Twenty minutes later, the radio crackles to life.
“Thunder three-six, green light on target Alpha Golf.”
“Copy.”
Gavallan lowers his seat an inch or two so that he can no longer see out of the cockpit. His world shrinks to the cocoon of instruments surrounding him. The stick between his legs. The throttle and weapons guidance joystick to his left. The infrared display that looks like a six-inch black-and-white television screen. The heads-up display above it.
He is at bombing altitude. A finger toggles the “master-arm” switch. The bomb is primed. Eyes forward on the IR display. Target spotted. A pale stable of buildings silhouetted against the gray desert floor. He has studied the target before, as he has studied all of Hussein’s palaces, and he knows the main suite of bedrooms to be in the eastern wing, a slim outcropping from the principal complex of buildings. His middle finger slews the crosshairs back and forth across the palace until he decides he has found the wing. Then, as if a mechanism itself, the thumb locks down. Jett Gavallan does not miss his target. Distance five kilometers. A yellow light flashes. Laser acquisition engaged. Red letters fire on the heads-up display. Target in range. Gavallan hits the “pickle,” a red button on top of the stick, and the weapons bay doors open. Darling Lil shudders. Still no ack-ack. No SAMs corkscrewing their way through the night sky. No 57mm shells bursting like flashbulbs on his old Kodak Instamatic. Gavallan does not question. He does not hesitate. He attacks. He is the spearhead of his country’s arsenal.
Gavallan depresses the pickle again and the bomb falls from the aircraft. Suddenly lighter, Darling Lil jerks upward, and as his harness strap cuts into his shoulder, he grunts with a secret pleasure. His eyes lock onto the IR screen and the delicate crosshairs positioned over the east wing of the Abu Ghurayb Presidential Complex. All external stimuli disappear. He is in a tunnel. At the far end rests his target. The crosshairs do not move. Thirty seconds to impact. Twenty.
Too easy, a voice whispers. Where are the SAMs? Where’s the flak parade? It is the voice that will haunt him for the rest of his life. He sees plumes of exhaust approaching the palace. He counts one, two, three vehicles. Tank? Jeeps? Trucks? Ours? Theirs? Someone running away? Someone arriving?
Ten seconds.
The crosshairs do not move.
The radio screams. “Thunder three-six. Abort run. Copy?”
The bomb appears on the screen. A dark dot skimming across the ground at an impossible speed. Above the screen, a red light blinks. Fuel warning. Tanks low.
Five seconds.
“I repeat. Abort run. Friendlies in area. We have friendlies on-site.”
The words fire in Gavallan’s ear as a warning bell sounds in the cockpit. The fuel light is dim. Above it, another light blinks in time to the urgent keening of the warning bell. The Allied Forces Locator. He has engaged friendly forces. His eyes dart between the lights, hesitating. Events blur.
Two seconds.
Only then does the finger dodge right, the crosshairs leave the palace and land in the desert. Or did it go earlier? Before the command? It does not matter. The bomb does not listen. She has been too long on her downward trajectory and it is as if she is too stubborn to alter her course.
“Abort run! Confirm, Thunder three-six!”
One second.
The desert flower blossoms. The screen blanches. A blizzard of white noise. The palace reappears. The east wing is no more, a bonfire of angles fallen in on itself. The heat signatures have disappeared, too, replaced by the blotchy, pulsing quasars that indicate fire.
Ours? Theirs? Coming? Going?
Jett Gavallan does not miss his target.
“Friendlies hit! Friendlies down!” It is Gettels, his operational calm obliterated. “Christ, Tex, I said abort!”
Gavallan blinks his eyes and catapults through space, through time, through the firestorm of his emotions to the present. He is walking. In his sleep, the baby named Henry twitches and is still.
Ten Marines dead. Two in wheelchairs for the rest of their lives. Forward elements of Task Force Ripper, he was to learn later. Scouts who got too far ahead of themselves. Gavallan knows their names to a man. He has sent the families checks for years. But their financial support is skimpy fare for a ravenous conscience. Everywhere he looks he sees pleas for help. Ask me, he begs the unfortunate. Order me. But his appetite for atonement is insatiable. Guilt, he discovers, is a desire, not an emotion. It can be slaked, but never extinguished.
And Saddam? Was he within one hundred miles of the palace? Not likely. News reports showed him touring Baghdad the next day, his beleaguered people showering him with praise.
As for the postscript, well, it went as he had imagined. The immediate transfer out of the theater of operations. The flight stateside. The firm and not so polite request that he resign his commission and never speak of the incident again. More he never learned. Who’d gathered the intelligence? Who gave the order for the raid? Why had the abort command come so late? Was the fuel light faulty? Was the allied locator on the fritz? What did it matter? No amount of rationalizing could scrub the blood off his boots. He had committed the cardinal sin: He had killed his own.
Now, if he didn’t watch out, he’d have another name to add to the list. Not a heat signature in desert fatigues, but his best friend in the world. The man who’d stood by his side at weddings, christenings, and funerals. The man he’d worked alongside twelve hours a day, week in, week out, for seven years. The man he’d sailed with to Hawaii, ate steaks with at Alfred’s, got drunk with at the Chaya. The only man he knew who gave a good goddamn about John J. Gavallan from Brownsville, Texas.
“Hey, Graf,” Gavallan called silently across the miles. “Hang on, bud, I’m coming to get you. Don’t ask me how or when, but I’m coming.”
Hundred-hour war, the world had called it. Piece of cake.
Gavallan looked down at Henry. The boy looked like he was smiling.
Piece of cake, kid.
19
Ker-thump!
Cate Magnus woke from a sound sleep, stirred by the jarring thud. The noise had come from downstairs. The den, she thought at first, still fuzzy. No, the study, she decided a second later, pinpointing the sound as having come from the room directly beneath her. Sitting up in bed, she trained an ear to the silence. The house was still and part of her wondered if she’d heard anything at all, or if the noise had simply been the slamming of a car door down the block.
It was early morning, and a predawn mist cloaked the bedroom in a grainy light. After a few seconds passed, she was able to make out the ottoman at the foot of the bed and the pile of magazines stacked on top of it. The Economist, Vogue Italia, Harvard Business Review, and, God help her, the National Enquirer. Throw them out, she ordered herself. All of them, before they become a fire hazard. Her eyes flitted to the hand-carved walnut desk under the window where she worked on her precious journals, black-speckled notebooks stuffed with daily musings, ideas for the column, personal promises, resolutions and dreams, press clippings of current events, photographs, drawings, and caricatures—a thirty-year-old’s running commentary on the world and her place in it.
In the corner stood her rotting, half-drunk armoire, teetering to one side on its bum leg. Beside the armoire rested her easel, her vase and brushes, and the fisherman’s bait box that held her oils and acrylics. With the painting I’ve done lately, I ought to throw those away too, she thought. The guarantee date on her precocious talent had expired ten years ago. But for her treasured possessions, she found no comfort in the familiarity of her surroundings. After a two-year absence, the room remained unfamiliar, foreign, more a hotel room in a distant city than the home for which she’d scrimped and saved for so long.